The present disclosure relates generally to power conditioning, and in particular to power regulation for aircraft flight-data acquisition systems.
Aircraft health monitoring and avionics systems are typically run on industry standard compliant power. This power may be noisy and subject to interrupts, making it incompatible with sensitive electronics, for example. In turn, aircraft systems often condition the aircraft power to remove noise and spikes, and provide hold-up power to prevent voltage interrupts from interfering with system operation. However, power conditioning circuits consume space and generate heat proportional to the level of power being conditioned.
Traditional aircraft health monitoring systems include a central host with many analog inputs. Power used by these systems is relatively consistent across applications, allowing for appropriate sizing of power conditioning circuitry. Future aircraft may utilize distributed digital systems, for example. In these distributed systems, digitization and processing may be performed at the periphery by “smart” sensors. These smart sensors can be daisy-chained together on a digital bus, allowing for one bus interface at a host to connect with one or many sensors. To keep the size of these smart sensors at a minimum, it is desirable to refrain from conditioning the aircraft power at the sensor, and rather obtain the conditioned power from the sensor bus. However, it may be difficult to design a system host that is capable of powering a large number of buses and/or smart sensors without being oversized for applications that include fewer sensors.